3 new Target Focus Training live classes are confirmed!

San Diego, April 26: A short-notice 1-day session at our headquarters training site. People are always amazed at the skill level they walk away with after only a single day. Read about it here.

New Jersey, June 20-22, full 3-day training: First New York area training outside Manhattan. At a hot new facility.

After this class you’ll have more useable knowledge that can save you life in a violent street encounter than someone who’s spent 20 years in the martial arts. And your training will leave you more competent than 99.5% of law enforcement or military personnel.

Remember, we were teaching these courses at US Naval Warfare Command back in the late ’80’s before anyone else even knew what ‘reality’ fighting was about. And it’s not about learning a few simple moves that look cool and MAY work “sometimes.” It’s about quickly learning a complete system… in just hours… one that guarantees your subconscious can call up instantly, without conscious thought, to destroy an attacker REGARDLESS of the situation, whether he’s got a weapon, or he’s bigger and badder than you.

You learn how to not just claw someone’s eyes… but easily blind them if that’s your only available alternative. You learn to not just kick him in the shins… but rather to effortlessly break his knee joint if it’s your only means of escape. And you learn to take his life with your bare hands… if it means saving your own.

There’s nothing else that remotely compares… anywhere.

Dallas, July 18-20, another full 3-day training: Possibly the last 3-day session in the US for 2008. Don’t miss it if you’re looking to get these skills live this year.

Other classes:

• There’s another 1-day session in the works. Possibly Brooklyn. Stay tuned this week.
• And a brand new, 2-day advanced class for those that have been through a previous live session.
• And finally, an unusual situation will have us teaching for the first time a full, 3-day class in Sydney, Australia and London, England. In the past these classes have always been just 2-day affairs. Watch for an announcement on these in the next week.

If you missed the Google video that demonstrates what a real self defense class looks like, check it out here.

-Tim Larkin

Human societies are fascinated with strength and power.

Obvious personal power especially–height, musculature, and a hair-trigger willingness to do violence are eternally impressive to us. We all desire what those attributes grant the possessor, to be respected, to inspire awe, and, perhaps, fear.

When we are intimidated, we feel all those things acutely. Most of all the gut-snarling fear. We feel it, and we want to make others feel those things, too. We feel it and realize we don’t want to confront the intimidating person… and wouldn’t that feeling be a very useful thing to project?

Only if you want to take it to the physical, to have to use violence to back up your newfound badass attitude more often than you’d like.

Intimidation is like juggling 13 double-edged swords and playing with fire simultaneously.

For our purposes we’re going to define ‘intimidation’ as the antisocial process of going out of your way to make someone afraid of you. Most people take this a step farther, not stopping at mere fear but going headlong into humiliation. Once they realize they’ve made someone afraid, they will typically push it and rub it in to humiliate the affected person.

As an interesting aside, it’s a common truth that people who use intimidation as a social tool will do the things that would intimidate them–they will project the behaviors that they, themselves, fear most.

Why is intimidation so dangerous?

Because it can get you killed, whether you fail or succeed to intimidate.

If you fail to intimidate the man, you have just escalated the situation–by saying, in effect, “Do you want me to hurt you?”–and now, unimpressed, he’s calling your bluff. If he’s the kind of guy who responds to threats with physical action, then it’s on. You just called it down upon yourself because you wanted to be a badass.

Most of the time it’s not going to be a problem–if it went physical all the time very few people would do it, right? The problem is, the people who get set off by this are the worst kind… and I hope I don’t have to tell you that choosing to escalate a screaming match into a life-or-death situation is asinine.

Let’s say you succeed in intimidating him. Mission accomplished, right? You put him in his place, you showed him (and everyone in earshot) who’s boss, you made him feel afraid. How could that possibly go wrong?

Yeah, I know–it’s a rhetorical question.

Let’s flip it around: he succeeded in intimidating you, he made you feel afraid. Maybe even made you feel afraid for your life. How do you respond? If you know how to handle the physical side, you can take it there in a blink of an eye and shut him off. Maybe you just feel socially embarrassed and walk away. Or maybe you knock him down, knee him in the face and stomp on his head until he’s non-functional. Maybe you pull your gun and shoot him dead. Who can say? It’s going to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

So you make him feel afraid. Most people will back down and disengage, usually while making even more noise than before. But there are some, the worst out there, who will take it as a threat and work to destroy that threat. They may go off instantaneously, or they may simmer for hours, days, months. In the long-term case, you probably won’t have the luxury of seeing it coming. And if you truly terrified them, they’re going to want to do things to even the odds–bringing accomplices and firearms, say.

So, succeed or fail, intimidation can get you killed. It’s a sucker’s game.

“But Chris,” you say, “If I’m not intimidating then I’m prey!”

Let’s make a quick clarification here: the opposite of being intimidating is not the same as appearing meek, weak or helpless–it’s simply not registering as prey. Looking like you know what you’re doing, that you are aware, yet comfortably unconcerned, is more akin to being socially remote. That is, you’ve got the ‘No Soliciting’ sign out without being a jerk about it. Appearing unimpressed and unafraid is not the same as being intimidating.

You can project the confidence that you can handle yourself without threatening anyone.

A high order social skill? Probably one of the highest. And for many people, elusive. But it’s a lot less harrowing than running around being intimidating, which is exhausting and scary at the same time.

I think of it like this:

“Go out of your way to get to the rest of your day.”

When in the social arena, be social, use your social skills, and treat everyone like people. In the asocial arena treat everyone like meat. Don’t confuse the two.

It doesn’t mean you have to be everyone’s friend, a ‘push-over’ or smile at daily human ugliness. It can be as simple as biting your tongue instead of spitting fuel on the fire. Of course, the hard part is if you’re successful, you’ll never know it. You’ll never even be aware of the trouble you’ve dodged.

You can only ever be aware of the trouble you’ve caused.

Chris Ranck-Buhr

As a follow on note… we spent time with a group of officers at a Federal Law Enforcement Training Center going over these very concepts. These folks often felt handstrung by what they were allowed to do in potentially violent situations and were amazed during the class as they realized for the first time that their training was putting their lives at risk. And then we showed them how to instantly turn everything around in their favor. And now we’ve opened this private instruction for everyone to see in Justified Lethal Force. And I’m betting it’ll open your eyes as well.

A frequent question we get is, “Okay, I get this whole violence thing, but what if–” and then it’s usually followed by something the other guy is thinking of doing, trying to do, or just plain doing.

This is code for ‘I don’t want to get hurt.’

Well, nobody does…

If this were something that you could reliably choose to avoid, it would be a central part of our training.

But it isn’t.

The truth about violence is that you’re going to get punched, kicked, stabbed, whacked and shot–whether you’re the ‘winner’ or not. Any other outcome, i.e., you walked through it and put your man (or men) down and kept them there without getting a scratch on you, is pure luck.

What you can realistically expect as the survivor is to limp out of there alive.

Accepting the reality of the situation ahead of time will save your life. It’ll keep you from quitting right at the point where things are at their worst. Let’s say you are trained in ‘knife defense.’ And then you get stabbed. Your first thought will be ‘omigod I screwed up’ and “It’s not working!” which will lead to the result of ’screwing up’–death. You’ll be thinking about the result of your mistake–”I’m going to die!”–instead of what you need to be thinking to survive, primarily ‘take the eye.’

Look at the difference there. We have an abstraction versus a concrete action. Which one do you want coming out of you when your life depends on it?

It’s also important to note that the people who are best at violence completely ignore the “What’s he up to?” side of the equation; they simply put all their effort into making violence one-sided, and keep it that way. They wade in and get it done, to the exclusion of all else.

And so should you.

Success is our benchmark. We are going to do our best to model the efforts and behaviors of those who are successful at violence–in short, we’re going to act like the survivors.

We are obviously not going to act like the dead (that goes without saying), nor are we going to model behaviors and action that we wish were present.

Rather than accessing violence the way we wish it worked, we’ll look to reality for our training cues.

This is a huge leap into uncomfortable places.

It would be really nice if we could impose our collective will upon violent conflict–if waving your hands a certain way meant you couldn’t be stabbed or shot. In a lot of ways, this is the definition of magic and in many places such training is elevated to the status of superstitious tradition. You’d be best served to never forget that the intersection of magic and reality is often tragedy.

Instead of training the way we wish it was, we’re going to train the way it is. We’re going to start at the point of injury, and let the other guy worry about waiting and seeing. He can wait and see what you’re up to while you do it to him.

Reality is a smog-belching bulldozer with the elves and fairy-folk of nice ideals all broken and snarled up in its iron treads.

If you have a choice–and you do–then put yourself in the driver’s seat, and the other guy beneath the blade.

or

Why you can’t learn anything of value from the dead guy.

When we see an act of violence, we feel it in our guts. Our eyes turn to the hapless victim, desperately trying to defend himself, and a part of us is there, suffering with him. This is what sane, socialized people experience when they see violence–empathy. We can imagine the pain and we empathize with the plight of the victim. This is normal and natural and good. It’s what makes society tick along and keeps us from tearing out each other’s throats at the drop of a hat.

If you spend any time at all worrying about things like violence, that knee-jerk empathy morphs into questions: What could the victim have done differently? How can I keep that from happening to me? The fantasy is that if only you could learn from his mistakes, then what happened to him can’t happen to you.

A neat idea, but much like the dead guy, full of holes.

The only piece of (almost) useful information we can learn from the dead guy is to not be there. I say ‘almost useful’ because it’s stupid-obvious. It works okay when you’re presented with a clear-cut choice–do I escalate or disengage? But it’s stupid when you think about scenarios like workplace shootings. “I’m not coming in today–I feel a shooting coming on.”

Anything you think you could learn from the dead guy’s performance–if he’d just gone for the eye or not stepped back–is pointless because it’s all pretend. It’s make-believe.

It didn’t happen that way.

Someone else in the picture was doing something. Something that worked. Something that got the job done. Something that made the dead guy dead. He’s the one you’re going to want to look at if you want to learn what works in violence.

Is this a nice, comfortable idea? Hell no. The vast majority of violent video footage also happens to be criminal. And you, not being a criminal, will find it naturally difficult to identify with the person doing the violence. But that’s the only place where there is anything useful to be learned.

Why? Because it is a record of what works in violence. It’s not pretend, it’s not coulda-woulda-shoulda–it is. When we shift focus off of the dead guy and onto the survivor we leave the world of conjecture and land squarely in the realm of fact. If you’re going to bet your life on something, I don’t recommend you bet it on a bunch of opinions or armchair quarterbacking–bet it on the facts.

The person doing the violence is using the facts to his advantage. Pay attention to what he’s up to.

The only thing the dead guy can show you is the end result of those facts. And that’s information you already had going in.

All theatrics aside, the answer truly is ‘none.’

Everything you train to do to people–and really, pick any one thing, shattered, torn, crushed, ruptured and otherwise useless for the very important function it used to perform before you got hold of it–has got to hurt, right? The gouged eye, especially, must be a unique kind of agony, more intense and horrible than anything you’ll ever (hopefully) experience. How it feels has got to count for something, right?

Maybe.

And because it’s just ‘maybe,’ you can’t bet your life on it.

The problem with pain is that it is subjective–it’s experienced entirely inside the brain of the individual. Because it’s a subjective experience, it can be dampened or magnified depending on the person’s mood, state, and/or current circumstance.

The physical fact of pain is that it is a signal elicited by the deformation or destruction of tissue. (And cold & heat–in short, the signal is supposed to impel you to move away from things that are doing you harm.) And that’s where the facts end–it’s how the brain processes that signal that makes pain so ‘iffy.’ How many times have you received a minor injury or wound that you had no idea how it occurred, or even when? Because you were distracted, you processed the pain signal as something else, as pressure, or an itch. On the flip side, if you held still and watched yourself get cut (for example) it might end up being more painful than if it happened without your direct knowledge. Both of these situations illustrate just how subjective pain can be.

It’s important to note that spinal reflex reactions are NOT in response to pain, in fact, they are usually triggered ahead of the pain signal reaching the brain. The reflex happens outside the ‘feel pain, decide what to do’ loop–and we should all be glad it does. That way we don’t waste any time registering that the stove is hot and then deciding whether or not to pull the hand back. The hand hops off the stove on autopilot, THEN it hurts.

Can pain do anything for you in terms of violence? It can–through two effects: vasovagal syncope (fainting) and encouraging the man to capitulate. I’ve heard direct anecdotal evidence of both of these at work in violence (viewing a deformed limb and passing out; curling up into a ball (‘going fetal’) once injured and on the ground), but because both of these are situational and subjective you can’t bet your life on them. If you start tearing a man apart and he faints–terrific, now it’s time to take full advantage of what you got. If you break him and he quits, likewise exploit the hell out of the gift of his lack of resolve. But don’t count on it.

If he is ‘feeling no pain’ or has iron-willed resolve or simply has a high pain tolerance, how bad it hurts will literally make no difference. This is why we don’t care about whether or not it hurts–only whether or not it works. And by ‘works’ I mean that thing you broke doesn’t work anymore. If his torn-out knee agonizes him into fainting or quitting, great–if not, it still doesn’t work. He can’t get up and run around. He’s down and crippled and now you get to set to work on a downed, crippled man.

This is the difference between what we at TFT train and ‘pressure point’ or joint-locking techniques. Both of those things hurt like an expletive in all caps with three exclamation points after it when we do them on each other in a controlled environment, especially if we’ve been told ahead of time that they are excruciating. Get out into the real world and you’ll have mixed results–those who are susceptible to pain will writhe and cry and submit; those who aren’t feeling it will keep on trying to kill you. And should they get loose, they will.

This is why you want to hew to the idea of ‘broken is broken’ instead of ‘this is gonna hurt.’ Does it hurt? Maybe. Can it hurt? Sure. Do you care?

Not one whit.